The Order of the Blue Polo - Member 00000

I know this is kind-of out of the ordinary, however, I wanted to email
you to let you know something that I observed this past Friday.

This past Friday, our Data Center team and some executives had the
opportunity to tour [a large healthcare provider]'s brand new 40
million dollar data center here in town. If you're not familiar with
[this provider], it's one of the biggest health insurance providers in
America and it's headquartered here in town.

Overall the center was very impressive and kind-of put ours to shame a
bit. But one thing that our entire group noticed was that they built
this new 30,000 square foot Data Center (ours is 3,200) and a nice NOC
for tons of people. I mean, they had probably 20-30 people manning
all their systems just for monitoring. I asked them what they used to
monitor their systems and they told me HP Openview and some others,
but that they could only really monitor Windows servers really well.
They could barely watch their mainframe systems and their Linux and
AIX systems. They were spending money left and right to get things
monitored. I mean, we stood in a room full of people watching screens
and essentially as we called them "screen monkeys" waiting to manually
catch something.

What's interesting is that they are 10 times our size with only 4
times our number of servers, however, we use OpenNMS extensively in
our IS department and do it only using 3 operators per shift. Because
of OpenNMS we can easily use one operator per shift when needed like
weekends.

So basically what this boils down to is that it was a real defining
moment for us when we all kind-of realized how much money and labor
they were wasting when they could be using your product. We know that
you guys know you have a great product, however, it's times like this
when it's clear just how well you guys have done to set you apart from
all the other guys.

Our business relationship along with your product is a recipe for
great success. This is one thing that [the healthcare provider] does
not have on us and one thing that we've got that far outshines them!
Keep up the good work!